


loneliness is how little you want me

by emollience



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Eventual Happy Ending, F/F, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Lesbians in Space, Mutual Pining, Post-Episode s05e07 Taking Control, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Time Skips, i promise it'll have a happy ending i just love suffering
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-17
Updated: 2020-12-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:53:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28121187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emollience/pseuds/emollience
Summary: In one version of the story, Catra reached out. She gripped Adora’s hand, hung her head, and breathed to life the want thrumming through every nerve in her body.Adora, stay.In this one, Adora hesitated once more, another half step frozen in reluctance. Catra, kneeling on the floor, dug her claws into her thighs and tightened the flat line of her mouth. She had been alone for years. She had fallen to her knees countless times and no hand reached out to pull her up. She always got back up on her own, until she didn’t. Until she couldn’t. Until it took a girl with magic to breathe life back into her corpse.She watched Adora leave.-when catra said she wanted to be left alone after they rescued her from horde prime's ship, adora listened.
Relationships: Adora/Catra (She-Ra), Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Comments: 36
Kudos: 202





	loneliness is how little you want me

**Author's Note:**

> absolutely no one asked for this. when i asked, "hey why hasn't anyone else written this au yet?" a friend replied "you're the only one evil enough to come up with that." i'm mentally ill and take it all out on a pair of fictional lesbians, apparently. 
> 
> this takes place immediately after "save the cat" and diverges from the episode "taking control." here's a playlist! [x](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7mYIrjOCvZaBI4436IJWwT?si=nwyGHwu2Szqcf4SWgre8gg)

I once had a body that wasn't a body   
it was a voice in a god's mouth.  
It was a holy vowel.    
"MORAL INVENTORY," Ruth Awad 

Can you believe I still want you  
I cannot believe you would choose loneliness  
Loneliness is how little you want me    
"BROTHER," Melissa Broder 

* * *

  
  
**PROLOGUE**   
  


_Cast out the shadows. Cast out the shadows. Cast out the shadows. Cast out the shadows. Cast out the shadows. Cast out the shadows. Cast out the shadows. Cast out the shadows. Cast out the shadows. Cast out the shadows. Cast out the shadows. Cast out the shadows. Cast out the shadows. Cast out the shadows. Cast out the shadows. Cast out the shadows._

_All beings must suffer to become pure._

Catra woke with a strangled gasp. Her body lurched up and she clutched at her throat, choking, but found nothing but oxygen flowing easy into her lungs, though the taste of neon green amniotic fluid stuck to her tongue, the roof of her mouth. It was too dark, but the shape of the walls molded to the arching metallic space of the purification room, memory braiding into reality, until it tunneled towards Horde Prime grinning at her. 

_“You will suffer no longer, little sister.”_

The sheets were soaked through with sweat. The singular black blanket decorated the cot a shredded mess and when her limbs finally eased from the tight grip of terror she noticed her claws, protracted and long, embedded deep into the mattress. 

A mattress. 

Already, memory faded: Around her hummed the discordant buzz of a ship, soft and striking against the memory of the eerie silence of Horde Prime’s ship. He mastered the art of quiet, the tense, blood-curling beat of anticipation before the blow of a strike. Here, Catra’s ears caught too much noise: Voices beyond the steel door, vibrant and loud; footsteps clacking against the steel floors without the fear of warning others of their arrival. 

Still, she was alone. 

That much she could appreciate given her current state. She forced herself to exhale; listened to the way her heartbeat juddered and tried to force herself calm. She reached up to smooth back her hair only to find the sharp ends of it cut rough and jagged. Her hand shook. 

She bent forward, buried her face into the mattress, and screamed. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Catra only remembered in flashes: the glow of the purification pool casting a luminescent green over the room; the snip of scissors as she sat a catatonic mess, one of the clones turning her head this way and that. It had been after she was dropped into the pool, she knew. The clones tried before, but she snarled and kicked and clawed at them until one shocked her. It was only after she was purified by the amniotic fluid, after she had choked and thrashed in it, that they had all been able to sit her down and rid her of her long mane of hair. 

When the chip had first connected to her, she had felt Prime in her mind. He had rifled through her every thought, and want, and memory. He had laid every neuron and synapse and nerve out before him until he could read her like a book. She let him. She welcomed him. He collected the tangled threads of her hurt and said, “You are free of it, little sister.” Shadow Weaver, and Hordak, and Scorpia, and Adora became just names, then. The memories meant nothing. She was exalted. She was risen. She basked in the glory of Prime’s grace. 

With the chip still embedded at the back of her neck, even damaged as it was after Adora rescued her, she felt traces of the interconnected hivemind; felt the overwhelming, intertwining thoughts of thousands just grazing the edges of her mind. It was incomprehensible. It was too much. The knowledge that she was no longer alone had been freeing. Once she had been forced in, she had found she cared little to come out. In the hivemind there was no pain; no grief. It had unspooled around her into nothingness. 

Now, though. Now her grief was her own. Now her anger bristled every time the door slid open with a hiss and Adora peeked in with no one to reel it in except herself. 

Could Horde Prime feel it? Could he still feel her?

  
  
  
  
  
  


“Do you want me to help?” Adora asked. She stood at the bathroom door, hands hugging her elbows. Catra met her eyes through the mirror’s reflection and narrowed her own. 

“Do you get off on feeling needed?” she answered. She ran her fingers through her hair. Funny, really, that the clones managed to give her such long bangs. “What are you still even doing here?”

Adora scowled. Catra’s chest ached at the sight, and she almost turned around; almost reached a hand out to say _I’m sorry._ _Stay with me._ But she knew Adora. She knew that Adora hated her. There existed no reality where she didn’t. She had searched for one long ago and found none. 

“I just—It’s not a bad thing to wanna check on you, Catra.” 

“I don’t need a babysitter.” She pinched a lock of hair between the pads of her thumb and index finger, then raised the scissor in her other hand and cut it with a quiet snip. She let the lock fall into the sink, then repeated with another. “Ever consider that I might not want you watching me every second of the day?”

“That’s not—” Catra practically felt the rattle of the frustrated sigh Adora let out. Her eyes flitted to Adora’s reflection at the corner of the mirror, falling right onto the irked downward curve of her mouth, the slight wrinkle between her dark brows. When Adora’s eyes met hers through the reflection, Catra struggled not to look away. “You can be such a dick sometimes. You know that, right?” 

A startled laugh escaped her. “Whoa. Foul mouth, Adora. Where’d you get it from? I always thought the princesses fainted if they heard that kind of language.”

“Have you met Glimmer?” 

“Unfortunately.” She cut at another lock of hair. Her bangs brushed the lines of her eyebrows now, no longer long enough to fall forward and brush against her cheeks. She ruffled them a little, and before she thought too long and hard about it she said, “Can you get the back for me?” 

Adora hesitated. Through the mirror’s reflection Catra caught the way Adora momentarily froze, her eyes going wide. She steeled her back and crossed the room. She stood behind Catra and her eyes flitted to meet hers in the mirror, wide and open, and Catra didn’t turn, just passed the handle of the scissors over her shoulder to Adora.

The first touch of Adora’s hesitant fingers to the back of her head nearly keeled Catra over. It sent a jolt through the whole of her body. Vaguely, she remembered the tight embrace of Adora’s arms once she awoke, revived from a fall her disconnected body leapt into: the warm press of Adora’s body still radiating with magic; the way her palm curved against the length of her skull, her fingers caught in the tangled hair; the tears that dripped onto the shoulder of the white bodysuit she couldn’t recall fitting into. Adora had promised to take her home. For once, she followed her word. 

She caught Adora’s eyes through the mirror’s reflection. She shut her own. 

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” whispered Adora. 

“You can’t make it any worse.”

Silence followed, intercepted only by the quiet snipping of the scissors. Adora brushed bits of hair from Catra’s shoulders. She cleared her throat, her hand lingering on one shoulder, palm resting right on the strap of her cropped shirt, only her pinky touching her bare skin. She said, “I’m done, I think,” and then set the scissors on the edge of the sink.

Catra opened her eyes and met the face of a stranger. 

The bags hanging beneath her eyes rivaled the ones she wore for so long before Prime beamed her and Glimmer away from Etheria. Those were familiar; grounding, even. The pallid skin, the near skeletal protruding cheekbones, the shorn off hair: those were new. The short, tousled dark hair was better than the long bangs and gelled back locks she sported when she first awoke on Adora’s ancient ship, but she missed the long mane of hair she spent years growing out. She missed the weight of it against the nape of her neck, brushing against the small of her back. It had provided a comfort. 

Adora stepped closer, the warmth of her near burning. The swell of her chest brushed against Catra’s back. She stared at Catra through the reflection, her brows furrowed. The expression was so familiar that they could’ve been the children hiding in the corners of the Fright Zone, Adora prodding at Catra to open up, to trust her. 

She hadn’t let go of Catra’s shoulder. She said, “It looks better.”

“Yeah, well, I doubt any of Prime’s clones were hair stylists to begin with.” She turned in the small breadth of space between Adora’s body and the sink, shrugging off Adora’s touch. She gripped the cold, porcelain edges and remained in place. 

Adora cradled the hand that touched Catra so gently to her chest, fingers curled into a loose fist. She stared down at Catra, and Catra couldn’t remember when she gained that extra inch or two over her. They had been the same height before Adora left. 

“I’m sorry,” Adora said softly, “I couldn’t get to you sooner. The ship―It was breaking down. We had to stop and refuel its power source.” 

“You shouldn’t have gone back for me to begin with.” 

“Catra―”

“I mean it,” she continued, ignoring the tortured expression on Adora’s face. “It wasn’t worth it. You put yourself and the others in danger.” 

“I couldn’t leave you behind―”

“You already have before. For the good of everyone else. Why was this time any different?” She watched Adora’s face fall. “You didn’t even have She-Ra. I almost killed you. He would’ve chipped your friends. All that for what?” 

“He could’ve killed you,” Adora said, voice barely above a whisper. 

“So could’ve Shadow Weaver.” Then, before Adora could struggle for a response, she added: “Can you leave? You’re bumming me out.” 

Adora hesitated. Her foot skirted back, a half step frozen in reluctance. She looked anguished, like she wanted to say more. Despite everything, hope that Adora wouldn’t listen like she so stubbornly refused to for years caught itself half-strangled in Catra’s throat. 

Adora listened. She left. 

  
  
  
  
  


“If you think hiding from the people you hurt will make you feel better, we’ll drop you off and you’ll never have to see us again.” Adora paused, that righteous anger fading, her eyes falling from Catra’s. She inhaled; shut her eyes, steeling herself, and said, “You’ll never have to see me again.” 

Catra fell to the floor. In one version of the story, Catra reached out. She gripped Adora’s hand, hung her head, and breathed to life the want thrumming through every nerve in her body. 

_Adora, stay._

In this one, Adora hesitated once more, another half step frozen in reluctance. Catra, kneeling on the floor, dug her claws into her thighs and tightened the flat line of her mouth. She had been alone for years. She had fallen to her knees countless times and no hand reached out to pull her up. She always got back up on her own, until she didn’t. Until she couldn’t. Until it took a girl with magic to breathe life back into her corpse. 

Space was quiet. She learned that on Prime’s ship. Specifically, in the hivemind. Something about no sound in space; about how it needed a medium in order for its waves to travel. Darla reverberated with noise: The squeal of something gone right; the stomping steps of people who never lived in fear of the consequences of the volume of their walk; the booming laughter (Adora’s delighted, unabashed snorting giggles, louder than the rest); the buzz of quiet conversation, as if Catra couldn’t catch brief snatches of what they said if she really tried. She thought of Adora’s smile, the way it crinkled the corners of her eyes. Their funny little group worked well. Adora and Bow sat and listened to Entrapta ramble while Glimmer read, just like Scorpia used to. Funny. Another friend fitted better outside of Catra’s orbit. They were all already better off without her. They would be better off without her. 

She watched Adora leave. 

The doors shut with a hiss behind her. Entrapta remained at the other corner of the room, welding visor pulled over her face. She wrung her hands together, her hair wrapped around her small frame, and asked, “Should I go too?” 

Catra forced in a shaky breath. She pulled herself up. “Get this thing off me,” she said, “and then go.” 

  
  
  
  
  
  


A knock warned her before the doors slid open and revealed Bow, of all people. He held a plate of steaming food. 

“Dinner?” he offered, smile tight at the corners. 

Catra, sitting with her knees drawn to her chest on her bed, shrugged. That seemed answer enough for Bow; he stepped into the room, the doors sliding shut behind him, and sat at the edge of the cot, offering the plate towards her. She barely glanced at the food. She grabbed the fried clump of dough and bit into it, swallowing back the hiss of pain as it burned her tongue. 

“Adora said we’re dropping you off at the first free planet we can find,” he said. 

“Adora’s right, for once.”

He frowned, eyes searching Catra’s face. “Don’t you want to go back to Etheria? You don’t have to stay with us once we arrive, but at least you’d be home.” 

She snorted. 

Bow fixed a stare her way, one that eerily reminded her of Entrapta opening a robot up and diagnosing its glitch within seconds. She shifted in place. 

“We’ll drop you off, you know. If that’s what you really want.” He set the plate down on the mattress, just inches away from her. “It makes me sad, though.” She scowled at him, and his mouth twisted into an ironic smile in response. “I know. I barely know you, but...Adora loves you,” he said, like it was nothing. Like it was a fact. Like it was as true as the shifting moons of Etheria. “It’s hard not to care about someone when you’ve been with someone that loves them that much. Even harder not to root for them.” He stared pointedly at her. She looked away, face burning, and glared down at her feet. “I thought―I don’t know. I thought maybe we could be friends too.” 

“I threw you off a cliff.” 

“And I helped kidnap you,” he shot back. “We were at war. What’s a few war crimes between potential friends?” 

She couldn’t help it: She laughed, then clapped a hand over her mouth. When she looked at Bow, he was smiling. 

“You really don’t have to stay with us once we reach Etheria,” he repeated, as if it meant anything. “But if we just leave you on any planet...Catra, we might never see each other again.” He paused, then barreled forward: “You might never see Adora again.” 

She replied, “I know.” 

He blinked. He blinked again. Leaning back, he stared at her like Scorpia stared at Entrapta when she rambled about the mechanics of whatever project she was working on. Catra couldn’t stand it.

“I’m tired of hurting her,” she said. 

Bow shook his head. “You still are,” he said. 

“What’s one last time, right?” She smiled, her face stiff. “You won’t convince me otherwise. I’m going.” She slid the plate towards him, appetite gone. 

“Catra,” he said, voice despairing, like he could still convince her otherwise if he just said the right thing, if he just dangled the perfect prize over her. That was what he and the other do-gooders didn’t understand: There was no swaying her. 

“Thanks for the food,” she dismissed him. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


“I don’t like this,” Glimmer said, not for the first time. 

“You don’t have to,” replied Catra, not for the first time.

Darla edged closer to Valradus, a free planet― one of the few that remained in this section of the universe, according to the intel Entrapta managed to collect from patching onto different satellite feeds. No Horde ships lingered in its atmosphere and it lacked any of the towering spires Prime liked to prop up on his collections. It was safe; safer, even, than Etheria. 

They’re forced to stop at a checkpoint and as Bow and Glimmer head off to meet with the guards that could clear the ship, Adora and Catra remained in place: Adora, at the seat Catra once claimed for herself in the Crimson Waste, and Catra, perched on the sill of the plexiglass window. The knuckles of Adora’s hands glared white as she clutched onto the armrest and the skin between her brows wrinkled. She stared down at her lap, frown marring her face, and Catra could practically hear the gears in her head turning, overthinking written all over the curve of her mouth, the scrunch of her nose. 

She hadn’t spoken to Catra in days, or whatever passed for days in deep space. In all that time, though, she’d felt the burn of Adora’s contemplative stare at the back of her head as if she were something to be solved. As if Adora just needed to sit down, pull out a sheet of paper and some markers, and figure out her battle plan. Before a portal and the threat of universal collapse, Adora used to stare at her like that all the time across the battlefield. Like she could reach out, say exactly the right thing, and Catra would just swoon and collapse into her arms. It was funny, really, how bruisingly, how achingly Catra had missed even that in the past year and how she nearly had to force herself from preening under the attention now. 

Adora looked up and met her stare. It was too much. It was always too much. It had always been too much. 

Catra jerked her head away and pointedly glared out the plexiglass. 

“We’re clear,” said Bow. 

It was a simple process from there: Catra collected her meager belongings, nothing more than a bag full of clothes Entrapta somehow produced for her along with a space suit and helmet, and a small wallet full of chips that the planet favored as currency that Entrapta, somehow, managed to get a hold of. 

“It should be enough to tide you over,” Glimmer said. 

The atmosphere of Valradus matched that of Etheria’s and they all stood at the foot of Darla’s ramp sans space suits. Entrapta remained inside, tinkering with Darla’s system, and if Catra understood her at all, mostly avoiding yet another goodbye. Glimmer stood with her arms crossed, shifting her weight from foot to foot, a bundle of nervous energy. Bow settled a hand on her shoulder. Her shoulders sagged. 

“Are you sure you don’t want a tablet or our radio feed?” he asked, not for the first time. 

“No,” she repeated. “That’s just asking for Prime to track you guys down if I somehow get captured again.”

Standing off to the back, Adora flinched. Catra swallowed back the residual bitterness that she’d been drunk on for years. 

“I’ll be fine,” she said, forcing herself to look back at Glimmer and Bow. “You guys get out of here.” 

Glimmer and Bow exchanged a look, the gesture so similar to one she had been a part of another life ago that she almost fell to her knees, almost voiced the doubts just waiting to find freedom. The pair of them said their goodbyes and made their way back to the ship. Catra shouldered her bag, pushed her shoulders back, her chin up, and ready to turn her back from the ship except― 

“Catra,” whispered Adora. 

They stared at one another. 

“Hey, Adora,” she replied. 

The very corner of Adora’s mouth twitched, then fell. She looked anguished. That was the thing about Adora, wasn’t it? She wore her emotions so openly, so unashamedly, yet somehow managed to smother them so deeply that no one, not even Catra, could get a read on her. Catra had known her the whole of their lives, had thought she’d known her as viscerally as she knew herself, only for a sword and a destiny to reveal she’d never really known her at all. 

“You gonna try to talk me out of this?” 

Adora shook her head, that stupid ponytail swaying. “There’s no convincing you. It’s taken me years to figure that out.” 

It shouldn’t hurt. It shouldn’t. It still sent a pang through Catra’s chest. “About time.” 

“Yeah, well…” Adora shifted in place, arms folded over her chest, fingers digging into her arms, the fabric of her jacket bunching with the movement. Her cheek hollowed― biting at the inside of it, Catra knew. An awful habit Adora never grew out of, no matter how often Shadow Weaver tried to rid her of it. “Take care of yourself.” 

She almost laughed. She almost cried. “Yeah, well,” she repeated, “you too, princess.” 

Adora smiled, nothing like the beaming grins Catra had come to know for years. It softened her face as much as it weighed on it. She was just as beautiful now as the girl Catra had grown up with. A little older, a little ragged, but no less stunning. 

Catra was many things: Cruel and smart and cunning and ambitious and sad; but above all else, she was selfish. 

She committed that smile to memory. She planned to never see it again.

**Author's Note:**

> i have, like, half of the next chapter already written. feel free to yell with or at me on twitter @emoIIience or tumblr @canaanhouse


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